How to Guide for Parents
Starting School: Speech Therapy
1. Teaching school routines
• Visual supports and schedules • Classroom and listening rules • Bathroom and hand-washing • School and fall themed vocabulary
2. Targeting social-communication skills
• Requesting and asking for help • Commenting • Asking questions • Sharing and taking turns • Play development
3. Addressing language goals
• Following directions • Actions • Basic concepts • Answering WH questions • Logical reasoning • Sequencing
4. Recommended picture books, games, and songs
Teaching School Routines
Visual supports (pictures)
• Children learn language more efficiently using a multi-modality approach
• verbal information is paired with visual, tactile (touch), and kinesthetic (movement) feedback during play and music & movement activities
• Visual supports reinforce the verbal information that children are already receiving and are seamlessly integrated into school and play routines
• Visual supports can be used to teach young children how to communicate and expand their developmental language skills
• Visual supports reinforce social-emotional vocabulary
• Children attending school for the first time benefit from visual supports to teach them new school-related vocabulary
Schedules
• Creating a visual schedule establishes structure to a child’s day, as activities are repeated and become routine
• Children experience comfort from predictability in a new environment, which enables them to learn
• Children build an association between an activity and a chunk of time and learn to transition from one activity to the next
• first…then… language
• Schedules help children accept change; new events or activities are easily added to the pre-existing structure
Classroom and listening rules
• Children learn to follow school/classroom rules for safety
• The teacher uses classroom routines to build structure, making the new environment conducive for learning
• Listening rules are taught and reinforced via repetition • Children enjoy learning the listening song: Eyes are
watching, ears are listening, voices quiet, bodies calm
Bathroom and hand-washing
• Teaching young children to use the bathroom and wash their hands fosters independence
• Visual supports help them remember the sequence
• Hand-washing is especially important for teaching children about cleanliness and germs
• Teach children to wash their hands with soap for at least 20 seconds (sing the ABC song)
School and fall vocabulary
• Children learn academic concepts: ABC’s, numbers, shapes, weather, calendar, centers, and classroom vocabulary
Classroom and centers
Actions
Art
Toys
Fall
Targeting Social Communication Skills
Requesting and asking for help
• Offer the child choices to visually entice him/her and promote requesting during school routines
• Snack: juice, water, chips, cookie, apple, carrots
• Play: cars, trains, blocks, bubbles, play doh
• Art: dot markers, crayons, paper, scissors, glue
• Remember to withhold a desired item and wait for the child to request it using gestures, pointing, and/or word(s)
• Briefly withhold assistance when a child is engaging in a difficult task to allow the child to ask for help
• Examples: tying sneakers, opening the toy box, inserting a straw in the juice box, cutting with scissors, using glue
Commenting
• +1 Rule: increase the child’s current level of skill by teaching one new word or concept at a time
• Examples: “train,” “I see train,” “train go,” “look train go fast”
Asking questions
• Encourage child to ask questions during school activities
• Examples: what’s this, what are you doing, where are we going, why
Sharing and taking turns
• Encourage the child to share a toy with verbal reminders
and visual cues
• Examples: my turn, timer
• Facilitate turn-taking during activities
• Examples: child waits for his turn to put his picture on the school bus, child waits for his turn to read a book with the teacher
Play development
• Solitary play: the child is starting to play on his/her own and to learn about cause-effect
• Use visual models to teach the child to throw a ball, pour, scoop, stack, blow bubbles
• Parallel play: the child is watching and playing alongside other children without interacting with them
• Imitation skills are improving
• Associative play: the child briefly interacts with another child during a realistic pretend play activity
• Example: child adds a boat to a friend’s water table and comments about it to a friend, “look boat go fast”
• Cooperative play: children interact and direct each other while playing together
• Examples: children play dollhouse and coordinate their actions, they build a block tower collaboratively
Addressing Language Goals
Following simple directions
• Follow 1-step routine commands
• Examples: sit down, clean up, give me, put on, throw out garbage
• Follow 1-step commands for spatial words: up, down or actions
• Examples: stop, go, play, read, walk, jump, clap etc.
• Follow 1-step verbal directions for action + object or spatial words: in, out, on, off
• Examples: eat cookie, drink juice, throw the ball, color the circle
• Examples: put the ball in the box, take out the car, put on your sneakers, take off the school bus
• Follow 2-step related directions
• Examples: open fridge and take out the apple, put ketchup on your hot dog and eat it
• Follow 2-step non-related directions
• Examples: put the pizza in the oven and give me the spoon, glue the circle and count the triangles
Actions
• Talk about actions during play routines
• Examples: open, play, blow, drive, build, catch, read etc.
Basic concepts
• Teach descriptive words
• Examples: open, closed, big, small, clean, dirty
• Teach quantity words
• Examples: count the stars, more, most, all, none
• Teach spatial words
• Examples: under, on top, next to, in front, in back
Answering WH questions
• What
• Examples: what is the boy holding, what is the girl doing
• Where
• Examples: where do you wash your hands, where is the cow
• Who
• Examples: who is driving the school bus, who is playing with the train
• When
• Examples: when do you put the toys away, when does the teacher read the book
Logical reasoning
• What for object function
• Examples: what do you use to cut the paper, what do you do with a towel
• Why
• Examples: why do you go to sleep, why do you wash your hands
Sequencing
• Teach child how to sequence through multi-step routines
• Examples: build a train set, go to the bathroom
Step 3: make the train go
Step 1: build the train tracks Step 2: put the train on the tracks
Step 4: clean up the train set
Recommended picture books
• Rosie Goes to Preschool
• Sesame Street Celebrate School: First Day
• Wash Your Fins Baby Shark
Games
• Sesame Street Potty Planner
• Sesame Street Elmo’s School Friends
• Sesame Street Super Elmo’s ABC Jump
https://www.sesamestreet.org/games
• ABCya Alphabet Bubble
• ABCya Birthday Candle Counting
• ABCya Make a Pumpkin
https://www.abcya.com/grades/prek
School routine songs
• Good Morning, Who Came to School Today
• There are Seven Days, What’s the weather
• Wheels on the bus, Open shut them, If you’re happy & you know it
• Eyes are watching, Head shoulders knees & toes
• Clean up song, It’s time to put the toys away